American, b. 1946
Suzanne Anker is a Bio Art pioneer, visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’.” She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography as well as botanical specimens.
As a pioneer of Bio Art, an expanding international art movement, Suzanne Anker has created the first Bio Art Laboratory in a Fine Arts Department in the United States, at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.
A notable installation by Suzanne Anker entitled Astroculture (Eternal Return) was prominently featured in the exhibition The Value of Food (2015) in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Presented in a chapel, the work consisted of vegetable producing plants grown from seed employing the same LED light technology used by NASA to grow plants in space.
Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Anker received her B.A. from Brooklyn College of the City of New York in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1976. She currently lives and works in New York City.
As a pioneer of Bio Art, an expanding international art movement, Suzanne Anker has created the first Bio Art Laboratory in a Fine Arts Department in the United States, at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.
A notable installation by Suzanne Anker entitled Astroculture (Eternal Return) was prominently featured in the exhibition The Value of Food (2015) in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Presented in a chapel, the work consisted of vegetable producing plants grown from seed employing the same LED light technology used by NASA to grow plants in space.
Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Anker received her B.A. from Brooklyn College of the City of New York in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1976. She currently lives and works in New York City.
